One prediction I can now comfortably make after years of observation is that there is a direct, linear relationship between how much government funding a scientist gets and the inaccuracy of the theories generated.

The more politically connected the researcher, the more erroneous the “consensus” will be.

I have a new data point to add to the collection. There are reports that a large colony of penguins died of climate changed induced starvation.

An estimated 150,000 Adelie penguins living in Antarctica have died after an iceberg the size of Rome became grounded near their colony, forcing them to trek 60km to the sea for food.

The penguins of Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay used to live close to a large body of open water. However, in 2010 a colossal iceberg measuring 2,900 square kilometres became trapped in the bay, rendering the colony effectively landlocked.

Since 2011 the colony of 160,000 penguins has shrunk to just 10,000, according to research carried out by the Climate Change Research Centre at Australia’s University of New South Wales. Scientists predict the colony will be gone in 20 years unless the sea ice breaks up or the giant iceberg, dubbed B09B, is dislodged.

What galls me about global warming is this — every time something comes along that disproves/rattles conventional thinking it’s immediately dismissed by scientists. Really? Never a, ‘hey, wait a minute…’ moment.

The most accurate prediction of government-funded research, with close to 100% correlation with actual outcomes, is that government-funded research tends to discover a critical need for further government-funded research.

In the rare instance that breaks the pattern, some kindly older scientist will take aside the young, fresh-faced idealist who turned in a final result, and explain to him how it works.

You may have seen this article in the Guardian a few days ago reporting that 150,000 Antarctic penguins died because they had been trapped by a gigantic iceberg and were forced to walk 60 km to their feeding ground.

The article was based on an academic paper in the journal Antarctic Science.

As it turns out, the paper did not say that 150,000 penguins had died. In fact, most of the Guardian article based on the paper is false.

As with any living creature cut off from a reliable food source, they’re waddling off to find open water and fresh herring. They might be a tad thin when they find the Promised Ice Shelf, and maybe not all of them made it, but they won’t be annihilated.

But there’s no proof yet that the birds are dead. No one has actually found 150,000 frozen penguins. In fact, experts think there’s a less horrific explanation for the missing birds: When the fishing gets tough, penguins simply pick up and move. It wouldn’t be the first time Adélie penguins marched to new digs. When an iceberg grounded in the southern Ross Sea in 2001, penguins on Ross Island relocated to nearby colonies until the ice broke up